“New home”, the Name for the largest apartment companies in the German story, is ideologically enormously compatible. Under the national socialists coined, it was taken over by the social democratic-dominated unions in postwar Germany, after the appropriate housing stock had been transferred by the allies. The adjective “New” sound of the modernist optimism of the Weimar years, in “home,” reflected the conservative homeland protection movement.
Matthias Alexander
editor in the features section.
F. A. Z.
in Total, around 480,000 dwellings created under the Aegis of the New home then in the years 1950 to 1982. Most of them are inhabited until today. Reason enough, the history of the New home in an exhibition of work that is to be seen after stops in Munich and Hamburg in the German architecture Museum in Frankfurt.
The exhibition comes across as stuffy. It represents the stages of the development of the company, nicely illustrated, supplemented by contemporary films that give a good insight into the self-understanding of the company. In the framework of the Frankfurt Show, the projects in the Rhine-Main region-the North – West of the city and the Ben-Gurion-Ring in Frankfurt, as well as kranichstein in Darmstadt, Germany, will be put in a little more detail out.
Politically, the Watch is recharged by comments in the catalog. The curators Andres Lepik and Hilde Strobl from the architecture Museum of the TU München represented the view that to learn the New home for the present time something. The Thesis: spaces of Today, in times of dramatic housing shortage in urban areas, lack of us apartment companies like the New home, the be able to across the country, many affordable apartments within a short period of time to be completed.
byan unsound business model
The exhibition is, however, little evidence that this assumption would be viable. This begins with the unsound business model of the New home. Under the umbrella of the DGB, originally of Hamburg is a limited New home, it was after the merger with another regional company to a nationwide market leader. She was part of a trade Union business conglomerate, which was conducted under the rubric of “social economy”. The DGB wanted to show that he was a good, if not the better entrepreneur. He distinguished in two directions: against the for-profit business-oriented private, but also against the class struggle and Enjoyed in other European countries.
This went wrong in every way. The reason for the collapse of the New home to the revelations of the “mirror” in 1982, the corrupt self-enrichment of the Executive Board, under the chairmanship of Albert Vietor was, but the causes lay deeper, in fact, that from the Proceeds of the business operation, the Finance interest rates not to operate let. At the end of a debt-load of five to ten billion Mark.
